Top 3 Fundamental SEO Ranking Factors

We have often heard that the three pillars of SEO are content, technique and net-linking. The announcement made by one of Google's Webmasters Trends Analysts, Martin Splitt, in an interview upsets the established order. It was during a filmed interview that he played the question and answer game. Indeed, Google has just launched a YouTube series for SEO experts and developers to address the subject of SEO myths. The idea is to provide answers to frequently asked questions that one may encounter about SEO. And to the question "what are the top 3 SEO factors to consider",

SEO factor # 1: content

number 1 SEO factor is not the framework you are going to use, but the content. It is essential that your site contains content and that it is, moreover, of very good quality, so that it brings added value to the user. The content must, in effect, meet the needs of Internet users or something they are trying to do.

Content that responds to Internet users

It's not enough to show how the best your business is. It is necessary to answer the requests of the Net surfers. The contents must clearly answer them. For example, if a user is looking for a specific product, Google will suggest pages offering this product. The content of your product page must therefore offer added value to the Internet user by precisely detailing the characteristics of the product. The added value would also be to offer him in addition a product comparator or other e-commerce functions that would be useful to him. When the request does not concern a specific product, but a subject or a theme, then it is necessary to write content adapted to the needs of Internet users. Of course, keywords are important, but you also need to focus on the purpose of the page, what it will do for them.

If your content mentions where you are, what you do, how you are helping me with what I'm trying to accomplish, that's fantastic.

Content that uses the language used by Internet users

it's important to focus on the phrases people use when doing their Google searches. We know that they increasingly use long tail keywords and natural language. This is an evolution to be taken into account in its content.

SEO factor # 2: metadata

According to him, the most important factor after content is the use of meta tags that will describe the content. This will make it easier for Google's robots to read and understand the content of your page. But it's also useful for internet users. The meta description, for example, represents a small snippet of the page that appears in the results pages, allowing Internet users to quickly identify which page corresponds to their query, that is, to their needs and expectations. Likewise, meta titles are equally important. Your pages should contain titles that match the theme of the page, while being unique. You are no doubt aware that Google penalizes duplicate content. You should therefore ensure that you write unique content, meta descriptions and titles.

 

SEO factor no 3: website performance

We have said it often in our articles, especially since the switch to the Mobile-First Index, the loading time of a site is a very important SEO criterion. The performance of a site is precisely the third factor mentioned by Martin Splitt. John Mueller, SEO spokesperson for Google, recently said on this subject that this ranking factor is not a substitute for all the others. Lots of ranking factors are taken into consideration, which is a good thing. So the idea is not to apply everything perfectly. Loading speed is very important, of course, but that doesn't mean that a very fast site will always end up at the top of the rankings. The nuance is there. A site's performance is an SEO factor, but it's not necessarily an algorithmic ranking factor. On the other hand, the algorithm will not highlight at the top of the ranking sites that are not performing because Google does not want its users to have too long an experience on the referenced pages.

 What to remember?

While we tended to see everywhere that the main SEO factors were content, technique and linkage (or popularity), Google puts forward a slightly different top 3. For one of its SEO spokespersons, you have to focus on content, meta tags and site performance.